by K. Eason
Hope felt much like fear, a knife thrust under his ribs. “We are likely to both end up dead, trying your plan.”
“What’s the toadshit you’re always saying? Death is no great matter. Death is a doorway. And we’ve both come back before.”
“There must be a body to which the spirit can return. I doubt the wurm will leave so much of me.”
“We do this in Illharek. We’ll have the legion to help you. You teach me the songs I need, I go into the ghost roads, I fight Tal’Shik there—a noidghe who can conjure, yeah? That’s got to be worth something. I keep her busy, I slow her down, until the adepts can conjure her into nothing. Suck all her power away. So no one dies, Veiko, except Tal-fucking-Shik.” She made a strangled, frustrated noise. “Leave that pot, fuck and damn. Look at me.”
He set the pan down. Dusted his hands clean. Turned and impaled himself on midnight blue spear-points. Through his chest, his heart, out the back, so that his lungs bled empty of argument.
“Why are you so fucking determined to die?”
Ash in his throat, and bitter. “I lived half a year as an outlaw with only my dogs for company. I do not wish to return to that life. I cannot live in Illharek. And I wonder what need you will have for a partner when this is all finished.”
Not often he could render her speechless. Round eyes, round mouth, total astonishment. Then her mouth closed, and her eyes narrowed.
“You’re an idiot, yeah?”
She moved fast, uncoil and impact: her right hand on his chest. Her mouth over his. She was not shy like Kaari’s daughter, neither gentle nor modest. A hard kiss, violent and thorough.
She drew back. Her eyes were full midnight now, the blue driven to the edges by spreading black. “I need you, yeah? Alive. I don’t care where we go, as long as it’s us two. If that’s what you want.”
Not enough air in his lungs, in the room, in the whole world. He licked his lip. Tasted spice and smoke and an offer he had not expected. He put his hand over hers, pinned it over his heart. And then he leaned in and accepted her offer.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“What have you found?”
Belaery did not look up from the scroll spread across her desk. “Nothing yet. Nothing as long as you harass me.”
They were in Belaery’s workroom, which was one part office and two parts laboratory. Witchfire lanterns hung from the crossbeams, casting bright light across the chaos: vials and pots scattered on the tables, bowls and baskets and bundles of dried vegetation. There were two firedogs, one nearest the desk for heat, and the small one for—hell, whatever it was Belaery did there. Something noxious bubbling in a pot on the top of it, belching puffs of rot and sulfur as if there were something alive and breathing in the muck.
That was, by Dek’s reckoning, a good reason to stand closer the desk. It was a better reason to move the shutters aside and put her head out the window. The Academy perched on its own several tiers, stout towers poking out of a labyrinth of tunnels and chambers. Most rooms, from Dek’s limited knowledge, had no windows. Belaery had three. This one stared straight down to the Jaarvi. Dek leaned on the sill, looked down at reflected witchfire and torchlight studding the water. Looked like the night sky trapped beneath the lake.
“Chrripp.”
Briel clung to a crack in the wall. She had appeared close to the fifteenth candlemark at Dekklis’s window in the garrison, squawking and flapping at the shutters, demanding entry. She’d been cold, frost on the edges of her wings. Dek had thought first that was because of the storms that had been threatening Illharek’s fields with flood and hail. Winds that unsettled the rivers, so that even the Jaarvi sloshed against its banks. Then she’d seen the rolled leather on Briel’s neck and realized how the svartjagr’d got to Illharek so fast.
Ghost roads.
Two hundred years before, there would’ve been godsworn in the temples, sacrificing Alviri bondies to Tal’Shik for good fortune and good weather. Now, in this age of Reform, Illharek’s First Legate had a svartjagr bringing notes to her window, reports from the heretic in the field. According to Snow’s report, the Taliri had sacrificed the Dvergiri in Cardik’s garrison, everyone in a uniform, maybe a few civilians besides. Evidently, Tal’Shik was well pleased with those sacrifices.
“Chrrip.” Briel sidled closer. Her tail curved out like a rope, barbed tip pointing up. Her wings, partly extended, flexed and contracted according to whim Dekklis did not understand. Minute gusts, perhaps, from the lake. Currents in the air that a woman could not feel on her skin.
Briel stretched that arrow-sharp head at Dekklis. She was unsettling in close proximity. It didn’t help how much svartjagr looked liked little dragons. Ask an Illhari what she thought of svartjagr, and she might say vermin or nuisance or at least they eat rats. But she wouldn’t say, oh, that’s a dragon in miniature. No, svartjagr weren’t beautiful or majestic, the subject of study and art. They were common, like spiders, and just as well loved.
Briel hissed. Showed Dekklis the length of the teeth studding her jaws. She blanked Dekklis blind with an image of a great blurry shape, big as all the sky, with jaws that might eat a person whole. Violet lightning played along the faint outlines of wings and tail.
Dek’s heart lurched. That was a dragon. The avatar, probably. Foremothers, how could they fight that thing?
The sending rippled, and what was very clearly Briel snapped her jaws closed on a violet, lightning-laced tail. Swallowed and looked smug.
That animal had delusions.
The world shimmered back into focus, dragging a faint ache through the back of Dek’s skull. She blamed Briel for that. Blamed the sending. Blamed Briel’s anxiety, which mirrored Dek’s own, which made it difficult to wait for Belaery to read every damn word on every damn scroll she’d had brought up from the Archives.
“Adept.”
“Nothing so far,” Belaery snapped. “I told you.”
“Snow says—”
“I know what Snow says. I read the note, same as you.” Belaery sat back on her stool. Rubbed long fingers across her face. Probed disturbingly deep and hard along the edges of her eye sockets.
“Is Briel out there?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Because you’re fidgeting more than usual.” Belaery straightened. Rolled her neck and winced. “Nagging doesn’t help. Tell her that. Tell her, go eat something dead. Bet the hunting’s great in the Abattoir.”
Scrabbling claws, leather flap, and Briel appeared in the window. Wide wings, open jaws, just like the motherless sketches. Dek was glad that svartjagr didn’t spit fire, which dragons were said to do, or Belaery might be char and ash.
Dekklis stuck a hand out, stupid-close to Briel’s mouth. Felt the gust as the svartjagr’s teeth clipped shut.
“We’re trying,” Dekklis said. “Briel. We know it’s urgent. But Snowdenaelikk’s got to understand it takes time to go through every piece of parchment in the Archives. We’ve been trying all night, yeah?”
“Chrripp.” Briel folded her wings. Settled more firmly on the window’s wide sill. Daring them to try and chase her off; you could read that in the angle of head and tail.
“Motherless oversized bat.” Belaery glared at Briel. “Snow wants research so much, let her come back and do it herself, yeah? Until then, fuck off.”
It was astonishing how much Belaery sounded like the Senators in that moment. All the manners, all the etiquette stripped away in a fit of temper. At least Belaery kept a grip on her dignity. The Senators couldn’t even do that. Toer’s surviving matron had put on a very public display of grief, wailing and robe-rending, that suddenly evaporated when it was her turn to speak. Then a very articulate Senator Toer had demanded formal investigation into the fire at her house and the deaths of her daughters.
Of course, the investigating adepts blamed a conjuring error. They were Belaery’s people, everyone Midtowner, except for Daar Mikka, whose House had a Senate seat on the far edge of the very top row of benches. He had enough h
ighborn blood to get him into the Senate to deliver the report. Just enough respectability in his adepts’ robes that Toer dared not call him liar in front of everyone, although the traditionalists had been unhappy with an uncut man in the curia chamber.
Dekklis had waited, patient, and listened to members of Illharek’s oldest families squabble like svartjagr over a dead cow. Then she’d given up on decorum and stood up and battle-bellowed. Promised to send more troops out on patrol, and gave the Senators a new bone to fight over: which cohorts to send, whose daughters might march and command.
Foremothers, Snow would have loved the show. She had more reason than Rurik or Belaery to want the Republic in chaos. And she hadn’t told Dekklis about Istel and the God, had she? Hell and damn, Dekklis had to remember that.
But it had been hard to summon up any anger when Briel appeared in a puff of mist off the lake on her windowsill. It had been hard, when Dekklis had unpicked the knots holding a fine-grained leather tube onto the svartjagr’s neck and unrolled it, to remember to feel anything more than a sense of relief. Snowdenaelikk was alive. Thank the foremothers.
Then she’d read the motherless note and come straight to Belaery.
Dekklis- First: Godsworn here worked something major in the garrison. More spikes, all Dvergir, mixed sex, different marks than we’ve seen on their poles. Be nice if Bel could find some record of a ritual like that, and what the fuck it’s supposed to do. Some variant on avatar-making?
Second: Found a tunnel in the Warren straight into the mountain. Think it’s the S’Ranna’s real mouth. Should be records of who conjured it, maybe why. Maybe maps, too, to say where it comes out. Refugees coming, maybe Taliri driving them. Or they’ll be angry dead when they get there.
Third: We found the avatar. Ask Bel for everything on dragons.
The tunnel records, at least, had been easy to find. Dekklis had managed that search herself, with Belaery’s blessing, needing no special access or supervision to go through mere civic records. They were buried, misfiled—but there nonetheless. Business deals between Illhari Houses, dividing the spoils of Cardik. Court case testimony between competing masons, each thinking they had rights to a particular tunnel. Conjuring treatises, dense and dull as stone itself, about the techniques and potential ramifications of forcing a tunnel into solid rock, or whether there should be a law about following preexisting water-cut channels instead. Whether the whole Below would collapse on unwise heads if the project went forward. There had been no collapses, but the route to Cardik had proved difficult and expensive. And, conveniently, parts of the records were missing. The actual map of the route between Cardik and Illharek, for instance.
By now Rurik and Istel and the Sixth would be down looking for the entrance to that tunnel, which should come out very close to the Riverwalk, according to the maps she had found, and closer to the Tiers than most of the Suburba. Opportune, perhaps, for a small Taliri strike. A strike easily turned, easily defeated—there were numbers involved, all in the legion’s favor—but with the Suburban mood as volatile as it was, any raid, any breach in perceived Illhari security would be like a lightning strike in dry tinder.
It was that possibility that had brought her up here to Belaery’s office, the one place Rurik and Istel agreed, together, that she’d be safe from Taliri assassins’ godmagic. They would not be, down there looking for that entrance, but Rurik insisted her life was the more valuable.
Hell and damn, valuable.
Dekklis looked at the woman poring over scrolls at the table. At the very walls around her, the spires and turrets outside the window. The Academy, with its conjurors and scholars, its chirurgeons and engineers and habit of choosing talent over birthright. It was no accident that there were no highborn among the higher Adepts any longer. There had been problems this spring with divided loyalties. Highborn Adepts with godsworn ties. Those problems had mysteriously vanished, were probably svartjagr shit by now, bones lost in some svartjagr nest.
It was also no accident that Belaery was climbing the ranks. Szanys Dekklis was a Senator thanks to sororicide; but she was First Legate because of the woman sitting with her now. Uosuk Belaery, Midtowner half-blood, pushed and played with Illhari politics as if she’d been born to them. Bet she wouldn’t be First Adept someday.
The less-imaginative Illhari feared the conjurors for their visible powers. Shaping stone. Calling fire. Witchfire and shadow. The terrible workings out of legend that had broken the Alviri walls and unhorsed the Taliri. Disease. Plague. Madness. But let there be fever in the city, and every voice would say how precious, how wonderful, the adepts. Let some highborn need a new tower on her House, and there would be no institution more valuable, no profession more honored, than the conjuror.
But give the adepts a seat in the Senate, no, the very stone would crack open and swallow all that was good. The Senate wouldn’t unite on Illhari defense, but they would close ranks to defend their own power. To remind the First Legate of her limits, too. Fine. Let them think they’d won that fight, that the Academy would stay safely out of the curia chambers. Dekklis trusted Belaery to show more sense than the Senators did. Trusted her to be patient while Dekklis maneuvered to keep the Senate godsworn in check.
In the week since Toer’s burning, there’d been increasing reports, trickling out of Midtown and the Suburba, of fresh violence. Not the usual robberies and cartel territorial pissings, no. Organized attacks, in alleys and sometimes in taverns between well-armed groups that were not, obviously, the usual Suburban criminal. There had been no complaints as of yet, and the bloodshed had been confined to participants. But the rumors said those groups were highborn and loyal to a particular House or another. The new-old fashion for inter-House wars, relocated out of the Tiers.
For now, civil war was held at temporary bay by a First Legate and her allies in the Academy. The Senators knew that impasse would not hold. Schemed for it, against it, changed sides twice a week. It was only a matter of time before someone petitioned to build a temple or a shrine, and then the battle would step into the open.
Snow had predicted as much before she’d gone north with Kellehn. But Snow had stopped shy of predicting the outcome of that battle. Shook her head and grimace-smiled and said, only, “Don’t envy you at all, Szanys. I think I’ve got the easier job.”
Damn right, she did. Which was why Dekklis had spent a long night in the Academy instead of her bed and Rurik had taken his troops out before first mark. He might’ve found the tunnel by now. He might be back soon with a report. Then she would have something to do besides watch Belaery read.
“Motherless rat-eating worm-licker.” Belaery sat back. Pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. “I hate early-Republic secretarial script. All those fucking flourishes.”
Dekklis made herself wait three breaths before asking, “So, you found something?”
Belaery sighed. “The ritual Snow describes sounds something like the one in Mistra’s Devotions, when the Alviri Ghesht attacked the settlement near what’s now Riku. The Alviri godsworn summoned up some kind of swarm—I think it was ants. Or maybe crows. Anyway, they sent the swarm against the Illhari and drove them back Below. —Such a face you’re making. Surely, this isn’t the first time you’ve heard of the battle.”
“I recall the loss, not the magical details. Something else they left out of my lessons. —So, Mistra was an Alvir priestess?”
“No.” Belaery waited her customary two beats too long for Dek’s patience, leaving space for the then what that Dekklis never asked. Then she relented and sighed. “Mistra is one of the Illhari godsworn. After we lost that battle, she made a sacrifice to Tal’Shik of every Alviri bondie in Illharek at the time and became Tal’Shik’s avatar. She led the subsequent attack on the Ghesht personally. If I recall”—and Bel’s expression said she did recall, and perfectly—“the Ghesht tribe was obliterated. No survivors. But that’s where the translations fail us. Some say Mistra became the avatar. Some say she became an avatar, and
that there were anywhere between two and seven dragons involved in the battle that day. —Which makes more sense. The Ghesht still had horses back then, and damn sure they had ballistas—”
“So then we have at least one dragon flying around Cardik.”
“We have at least one avatar,” Belaery corrected, but she was frowning. “It sounds as if Tal’Shik’s favoring the Taliri in this. They have a dragon and we don’t.”
“We had highborn sons on spikes last winter. And the Laughing God’s people, too. How is this different?”
Belaery tapped fingers on the scroll. “Mm. Those highborn might’ve been the beginning of something on the scale of the ritual Snow describes, though we clearly interrupted it. It’s unclear if that kind of power must be used promptly, or if it stores itself someplace. It’s not entirely clear what they meant to accomplish. We can only assume it was making an avatar.” She hissed frustration, sounding very much like Briel. “Where would Illharek keep a toadlicking dragon if those halfwits had succeeded?”
“It doesn’t matter now, does it? There’s already one loose in Cardik. Even if this, this Mistra person managed to get several dragons to go wipe out the Ghesht, they were all on the same side. Tal’Shik’s not going to divide herself into avatars on opposite sides of a fight.”
“No. I don’t imagine she would.”
“And the glyphs Snow mentioned? The ones she didn’t recognize?”
Belaery glanced at the window, where Briel waited. Then she looked at Dekklis narrowly. “Did Snowdenaelikk ever tell you that she abandoned a very promising career as a chirurgeon to go north with that heretic lover of hers?”
“She didn’t phrase it quite that way, no.”
“I’m sure. She tell you why she left?”
Dekklis hitched a brow. “Seems obvious, yeah?”
“Because she’s a Suburban and half-blood, you mean? That’s what Snow likes to let people think. But she also told the head of Chirurgery to go fuck herself—those words, yes—when she was reprimanded—internally and privately, might I add—for her involvement in the disappearance of a certain highborn student.”
